Mehmet Güney

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Mehmet Güney ís an international judge and Turkish diplomat who was born in Siirt, Turkey, in 1936. Mr. Güney began his career in 1959 as an administrative assistant in the office of the governor of Ankara before becoming a member of the Ankara Bar Association in 1964. He then joined the legal department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs where between 1964-1989, he rose through the ranks from senior legal consellor to chief legal adviser in the Ministry, before his appointment as Ambassador of Turkey to Cuba, then to Singapore and to Indonesia. He worked for several years in the Turkish Permanent Mission to the United Nations in New York and in the Turkish Embassy in The Hague.

Between 1984-1989, he was judge at the European Nuclear Energy Tribunal in Paris. In 1991, Judge Güney was elected member of the International Law Commission (ILC) by the United Nations General Assembly for five years term and he served as a vice-president of the ILC. He was member of the ILC working group, which established the initial "Draft Statute for an International Criminal Court".

In 1995, he was appointed by the Secretary-General of the United Nations to the International Commission of Inquiry for Burundi, established by the Security Council. In 1998, he headed the Turkish delegation to the United Nations Diplomatic Conference of Plenipotentiaries on the establishment of an International Criminal Court.

Since 1998 Judge Güney has been a judge for the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and since 2001 he has been a judge for the Appeals Chambers of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda.